Saturday, April 21, 2012

Hard times much?

My home town is apparently in dire straits....

• Budget cuts give the axe to the medical examiner & morgue.

Autopsies and signed death certificates also will be casualties,Without death certificates, burials and cremations cannot occur, and estates cannot be settled. The investigators’ absence will create an “ongoing local disaster” for area hospitals, nursing homes, paramedics, police, mortuaries and “most significantly, the citizens of Lane County".Police and medics will face a dilemma when they can no longer call a medical investigator pager 24/7 and summon a death investigator to a crime or accident scene.

“We are prohibited by law from moving a body from a scene until we get authorization from a medical examiner,” the longtime chief said.

Not like this is a little hodink town- this is the 2nd largest City in Oregon- Eugene. It seems like they are going for the jugular-- they are going to pull the plug on the county animal shelter as well-- looking for some other entity to bid to take it over. Then cut back police & jail space.

Things are deteriorating quickly. But this bottom line scenario is too much. The county will no longer pay for the supplies needed to do the medical exams.

The main local hospital is scrambling to figure out how to fund the necessary service

Ironically, Oregon is one of those states deemed doing so well w a less than 9% unemployment rate, they are cutting out 20 weeks- 5 months of unemployment benefits.

without a death cert, beneficiaries cannot receive life ins proceeds or ira payouts. surviving spouses will have trouble accessing joint accounts and safe deposit boxes. credit card and other debtors will be forced into probate which of course cannot begin until a death cert is presented to the court! maybe lane county wants to just pretend no one is dying, but the irs and social security/medicare (just to name 2 govt agencies intimately interested in our deaths) will be very unhappy.

Debi ~ The scenarios you mentioned take a while to be processed even when everything is up & running-- but to have major delays will really gum up the works.

Also “We are prohibited by law from moving a body from a scene until we get authorization from a medical examiner,” Made me think we'd wind up having a bunch of corpses piling up in the region for lack of being able to process them. Kind of Edgar Allan Poe, or Twilight Zone-ish.

Over 200 County employees will soon lose their jobs, so the jail will be a joke, as no funding means criminals have a revolving door.

Oh BTW-- The budget cuts are being blamed on lack of timber revenues. Damned environmentalists won't let them "harvest" (rape/clearcut) the remaining forests.

They are asking Congress for more emergency $$$, the Senate OK'd it, now stalling in the House. Hey! We've got wars to pay for!Oregon has no sales tax, so we pay some of the highest personal income taxes in the nation.

FAIR USE

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.